Another note - GEICO will be paying out more than a few claims on vehicles in New Orleans after yesterday's citywide flood. The small storm headed this way hasn't even arrived yet. Projections from the Army Corps are that the Mississippi river could briefly overtop 19.6 foot high levees for the first time as the already-high river runs into storm surge pushing the opposite direction. Yesterday's flood was just a rain event but the flooding came up quick once the pumps were overwhelmed.

A neighbor of mine took over an old hardware store down the street from my house & turned it into an Ace in 2009.

The old place was super unorganized but everyone loved the owners & it was convenient.

The new owners are great & prices are competitive with Lowes, which saves me a 30 minute drive.(I can ride my bike to the Ace.)

The new(ish) Ace has thrived & he's added a rental business & most recently, a large warehouse in back to store more materials.

It will be interesting to see if Berkshire revisits the European debt markets and can pull off some negative yielding bonds at issuance. You could tell it was a point of pride for him when he issued the SQUARZ securities years ago (they did not work out to be a good deal for Berkshire). So he certainly does have a curiosity towards issuing negative yielding paper. Not as good as insurance float but probably better than the volatility of the index put float.

If Berkshire can replace all its debt and insurance float with negative rate debt why even be in the insurance business? You can shut it down for a few years or decades. But I suspect the problem is volume. No corporation is going to raise negative debt of 70 billion in Europe or anywhere anytime soon.

After the company’s acquisition by Buffett, Harpaz was appointed chairman of all the companies in IMC, the metalwork division of Berkshire Hathaway, which includes a large number of companies similar to Iscar such as Tungaloy in China, TaeguTec in India and Ingersoll and Tool-Flo in the United States. Iscar may be the biggest producer of cash for the group — 40% of the total — but from the top floor of the company’s management building in the Migdal Tefen industrial zone, Harpaz controls 160 companies in 65 countries that employ 14,000 people. They have annual revenues of over $3 billion, with a phenomenal profit margin of over 30% — an amazing figure for an industrial firm.

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Iscar has handed Buffett some $5 billion to $6 billion over the past 10 years, according to sources close to the company. This means Buffett has fully paid off his investment in Iscar, and Iscar still has another $1 billion in the kitty. Its sales have grown by hundreds of percent over this period, and it has a cash flow of $1.1 billion a year from operations — more than twice the figure at the time the company was sold to Buffett.